The 2nd PROSECCO Code-Camp was held in Antwerp from April 6th to 8th, 2016

After the success of the first code-camp held in Coimbra, Portugal in 2015, PROSECCO organized a second international code-camp on Computational Creativity in the city of Antwerp, Belgium in April 2016. The local organizers of the camp were Lucas Nijs of the Sint Lucas School of Art and Walter Daelemans of the CLiPs Natural Language Processing group of the University of Antwerp.

We started our brainstorming trying to identify the ingredients that are required for a good story, and we agreed the most important one is the "plot twist", i.e. the moment where something unexpected happens, creating dramaticc tension and interrupting the flow of an otherwise very obvious (and boring) series of events.

Thus, we decided to generate stories using action pairs from Scéalextric, where the two actions are connected with a "but". A quick test confirmed that a story with the following structure can already be considered reasonable and meaningful:

Goldfinger decided to pursue an approach grounded in drama theory and based on a composition advice from Edgar Allan Poe. The system creates a narrative starting from the climax and gradually working its way down the tension arc on both sides of it.
But -- how to measure tension to define such an arc...?

Our team, Stormberg, we aim to generate stories that change roles between villain and hero. In the stories, sentiment flows were measured in respect to protagonist. The story timeline flows from neutral in the beginning to negative in the middle to positive at the end.

How can we combine multimedia data sources such as Google Images to creatively paint pictures for a story that has been generated by a computer? In the Blofeld group at the computational creativity code camp 2015, we got inspired by this question.
Members of Blofeld group are:
1- Philipp Wicke (pwicke@uni-osnabrueck.de)
2- Robert Pfeiffer (bob@blubberquark.de)
3- Kasia Bigaj (k.bigaj@student.uj.edu.pl)

My Team's implementation (Le Chiffre) concentrated on a gamified story telling mechanism using a "Choose your own adventure" structure. The game's objective was to get the player to follow and essentially "complete" a story which adheres to the "Hero's journey" template. The player is introduced to four different archetypes derived from Jung's theory: the Mentor, the Trickster, the Helper and the Shadow. The player is introduced to the mentor first, and is encouraged to interact with the mentor with the goal of eventually becoming inspired by them.